Abstract

This study investigates the land-use patterns of the Iroquoian populations that occupied south-central Ontario during the Late Woodland period. Its initial objective is to understand their cultural ecology as reflected in the placement of their semi-permanent settlements over time. Its ultimate goal is to ascertain how environmental change and ecological adaptation contributed to culture change and particularly to the historical development of these populations and their long-term settlement shift from the north shore of Lake Ontario to Huronia and Petunia.

The theoretical guide for this study is the premise that an understanding of culture change can only be achieved by considering evolutionary sequences in all their particularistic complexity, taking into account both generalizations about human behaviour and contingent influences. The methodological guide is the concept of multidimensional constraint, the idea that human behaviour is the rational negotiation of objectives that are constrained by both internal and external parameters operating in a nested series of contexts. These principles are used to develop a methodology utilizing detailed environmental description, summary statistics, and careful evaluation and interpretation to investigate correlations between settlement locations and environmental features at the local, regional, and pan-regional scales. The overall objective is a well-grounded explanatory narrative outlining the multiple dimensions of constraint that influenced Late Woodland settlement in south-central Ontario.

The ensuing investigations yield numerous insights into Iroquoian cultural ecology and illustrate the complexity of the long-term settlement shift. In broad outline, it involves an initial phase of settlement, indicating continuity with the Middle Woodland period, an expansion phase, involving the occupation of analogous physiographic zones throughout south-central Ontario, and a final contraction phase, involving coalescence into the uplands of northern Simcoe County. At the local and regional scales, these phases involve slightly different adaptive strategies over time and space, influenced by constraints that included community population size, intensifying food production, temporal and spatial climatic variation, foraging logistics, changing distributions of natural resources, and geo-politics. These results demonstrate the adaptive capacity of these Iroquoian populations, confirm the efficacy of the methodological approach, and establish an ecological context for future investigations dealing with the social aspects of Late Woodland culture change in South-central Ontario.